We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book by Jorg Guido Hulsman: The Ethics of Money Production.
This pioneering work, in hardback, by Jorg Guido Hulsmann, professor of economics at the University of Angers in France and the author of Mises: The Last knight of Liberalism, is the first full study of a critically important issue today: the ethics of money production.
He is speaking not in the colloquial sense of the phrase “making money,” but rather the actual production of money as a commodity in the whole economic life. The choice of the money we use in exchange is not something that needs to be established and fixed by government.
In fact, his thesis is that a government monopoly on money production and management has no ethical or economic grounding at all. Legal tender laws, bailout guarantees, tax-backed deposit insurance, and the entire apparatus that sustains national monetary systems, has been wholly unjustified. Money, he argues, should be a privately produced good like any other, such as clothing or food.
In arguing this way, he is disputing centuries of assumptions about money for which an argument is rarely offered. People just assume that government or central banks operating under government control should manage money. Hulsmann explores monetary thought from the ancient world through the middle ages to modern times to show that the monopolists are wrong. There is a strong case in both economic and ethical terms for the idea that money production should be wholly private.
He takes on the “stabilization” advocates to show that government management doesn’t lead to stability but to inflation and instability. He goes further to argue against even the theoretical case for stabilization, to say that money’s value should be governed by the market, and that that the costs associated with private production are actually an advantage. He chronicles the decline of money once nationalized, from legally sanctioned counterfeiting to the creation of paper money all the way to hyperinflation.
In his normative analysis, the author depends heavily on the monetary writings of 14th century Bishop Nicole Oresme, whose monetary writings have been overlooked even by historians of economic thought. He makes a strong case that “paper money has never been introduced through voluntary cooperation. In all known cases it has been introduced through coercion and compulsion, sometimes with the threat of the death penalty. … Paper money by its very nature involves the violation of property rights through monopoly and legal-tender privileges.”
Here is the full book in digital form. Please see the embed links and put this book on your blog.
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Oh man….the LvMI is coming out fast and furious with stellar titles. I am getting so far behind on what I want to read it’s very frustrating. I hope the Government unethically prints more money and sends it to me via a new ‘stimulus’ so I can purchase these. hahaha
How about a moratorium on new titles so we can all be allowed to catch our breath.
Fantastic! Now, if only I can figure out the online store….
Please pay attention to the following presentation on the crisis:
http://www.slideshare.net/vnovikov/anticrisis-inaction-plan-presentation
An attempt to illustrate Austrian approach in 30 slides for “Credit Crisis in 30 Slides” contest.
Excellent, now publish his Deflation monograph and I’ll buy them both before the pound depreciates any further!
Any news on Economic Controversies, Privatizate he Highways, Turgot Collection and that new book by Rockwell?
I cannot thank the Mises Institute enough for making available economic truth in such powerful ways.
And to have money and ethics logically presented in its pure form by Jorg Guido Hulsmann is ultimately another one of the exquisite and sweet fruits of Mises via the Mises Institute.
I really like this “electronic book” format, it’s much more intuitive than pdf files, and much more like reading a real book, instead of just a long document.
Michael,
“I really like this “electronic book” format, it’s much more intuitive than pdf files, and much more like reading a real book, instead of just a long document.”
So far at least, I have to disagree. The side-by-side page display produces text too small to read easily unless it is blown up beyond the left and right margins. Then it shares the pain of all the pdf files that have multiple horizontal columns, requiring continual left and right navigation to read.
Regards, Don
a great book, and a worthy accompaniment to huerta de soto’s “money, bank credit and economic cycles”.
got to say i agree with don lloyd, pdf on scroll allows me to exercise whilst struggling with monetary theory. sore arms and sore head.
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